Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI (0.6%?)

Y Combinator 在 OpenAI 的持股（0.6%？）

Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s excellent interview with Farrow on Decoder, either. 说到那些在人工智能公司拥有宝贵少数股权的企业，上个月《纽约客》刊登的那篇关于萨姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）和 OpenAI 的重磅调查报道（由 Ronan Farrow 和 Andrew Marantz 撰写），有一点让我如鲠在喉。在 Nilay Patel 对 Farrow 的那场精彩的《Decoder》访谈中，这一点也未被提及。

Sam Altman was the president of Y Combinator for several years, and left to become the full-time CEO of OpenAI. The New Yorker quotes Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham multiple times, in the context of Altman’s trustworthiness. (Some of those quotes are firsthand, others secondhand.) Graham’s role in the story — particularly his public remarks after publication — comprised an entire section in my own take on the New Yorker piece, wherein I concluded: 萨姆·奥特曼曾担任 Y Combinator (YC) 总裁多年，后来离职成为 OpenAI 的全职首席执行官。《纽约客》多次引用 YC 联合创始人保罗·格雷厄姆（Paul Graham）的话，讨论奥特曼的诚信问题。（其中一些是直接引述，另一些是转述。）格雷厄姆在报道中的角色——尤其是他在文章发表后的公开言论——构成了我个人对这篇《纽约客》文章解读的完整章节，我在其中总结道：

I would characterize Graham’s tweets re: Altman this week as emphasizing only that Altman was not fired or otherwise forced from YC, and could have stayed as CEO at YC if he’d found another CEO for OpenAI. But for all of Graham’s elucidating engagement on Twitter/X this week regarding this story, he’s dancing around the core question of the Farrow/Marantz investigation, the one right there in The New Yorker’s headline: Can Sam Altman be trusted? 我会将格雷厄姆本周关于奥特曼的推文解读为：他仅仅是在强调奥特曼并非被解雇或被迫离开 YC，如果奥特曼能为 OpenAI 找到另一位首席执行官，他本可以继续担任 YC 的总裁。尽管格雷厄姆本周在 Twitter/X 上就此事进行了大量阐述，但他始终在回避 Farrow 和 Marantz 调查的核心问题，也就是《纽约客》标题中提出的那个问题：萨姆·奥特曼值得信任吗？

“We didn’t ‘remove’ Sam Altman” and “We didn’t want him to leave” are not the same things as saying, say, “I think Sam Altman is honest and trustworthy” or “Sam Altman is a man of integrity”. If Paul Graham were to say such things, clearly and unambiguously, those remarks would carry tremendous weight. But — rather conspicuously to my eyes — he’s not saying such things. “我们没有‘开除’萨姆·奥特曼”和“我们不想让他离开”，并不等同于说“我认为萨姆·奥特曼诚实可靠”或“萨姆·奥特曼是一个正直的人”。如果保罗·格雷厄姆能清晰明确地表达这些观点，那将具有巨大的分量。但令我感到非常显眼的是，他并没有这样说。

The thing that stuck in my craw is this: Does Y Combinator own a stake in OpenAI? And if they do, given OpenAI’s sky-high valuation, isn’t that stake worth billions of dollars? OpenAI was seeded by an offshoot of Y Combinator called YC Research in 2016 — when Altman was running YC. 让我如鲠在喉的是：Y Combinator 是否持有 OpenAI 的股份？如果有，考虑到 OpenAI 高得惊人的估值，这部分股份难道不值数十亿美元吗？OpenAI 是由 Y Combinator 的分支机构 YC Research 在 2016 年孵化的——当时奥特曼正是 YC 的掌舵人。

In December 2023, the well-known AI expert (and AI-hype skeptic) Gary Marcus wrote the following, in a piece on Altman’s trustworthiness in the wake of the OpenAI board saga that saw Altman fired, re-hired, and the board purged in the course of a tumultuous week: 2023 年 12 月，在 OpenAI 董事会风波（奥特曼在一周内经历了被解雇、重聘以及董事会大换血）之后，知名人工智能专家（同时也是 AI 炒作怀疑论者）加里·马库斯（Gary Marcus）在讨论奥特曼诚信的文章中写道：

After poking around, I found out that “I have no equity in OpenAI” was only half the truth; while Altman to my knowledge holds no direct equity in OpenAI, he does have an indirect stake in OpenAI, and that fact should have been disclosed. In particular, he owns a stake of Y Combinator, and Y Combinator owns a stake in OpenAI. It may well be worth tens of millions of dollars; even for Altman, that’s not trivial. Since he was President of Y Combinator, and CEO of OpenAI; he surely was aware of this. “经过一番探究，我发现‘我在 OpenAI 没有股权’只说了半句实话；据我所知，虽然奥特曼在 OpenAI 没有直接股权，但他确实拥有间接持股，这一事实本应披露。具体来说，他持有 Y Combinator 的股份，而 Y Combinator 持有 OpenAI 的股份。这部分价值可能高达数千万美元；即使对奥特曼来说，这也不是一笔小数目。既然他曾是 Y Combinator 的总裁，又是 OpenAI 的首席执行官，他肯定对此心知肚明。”

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion. 因此，Y Combinator 持有 OpenAI 的股份是众所周知的。但持股比例是多少呢？这似乎是一个极难获取的信息。我四处打听，一位了解几位 OpenAI 投资人的知情人士给了我一个答案：Y Combinator 持有 OpenAI 约 0.6% 的股份。按照 OpenAI 目前 8520 亿美元的估值计算，这部分股份价值超过 50 亿美元。

Graham and his wife Jessica Livingston are two of Y Combinator’s four founding partners. The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disclosed when quoting Graham as an Altman character reference. A billion dollars here, a billion there — that adds up to the sort of money that might skew a fellow’s opinion. 格雷厄姆和他的妻子杰西卡·利文斯顿（Jessica Livingston）是 Y Combinator 四位创始合伙人中的两位。保罗·格雷厄姆个人在 OpenAI 拥有数十亿美元的利益，这并不意味着他对萨姆·奥特曼的诚信和领导力的公开评价就无效。但当引用格雷厄姆作为奥特曼的人格担保时，这显然是应该披露的信息。这里十亿，那里十亿——这些钱加起来，足以影响一个人的观点。